Film – Page 2 – Generation P: Edward Crabtree's blog.

A CHILD WITH SECRETS.

The film DETECTOR is a state of the art psychothriller that offers some cold comfort in its cloistered outlook.

The 47-year-old Kostas Marsaan, hailing from a village in the far North East of Russia, Yakutia, made a name for himself with his folk horror film Ichchi from two years back and has since become identified with a `Yakutian horror` scene in film.

His latest motion picture, a wintry puzzler called Detector is neither a horror nor set in Yakutia but yet bears many of the hallmarks of his more niche debut. Released in Russia early this March, the film consists of a psychological thriller with some modern Gothic trappings. Like Sisters it might also be said to partake a little of the much talked about trend of `Elevated horror`. In short, meandering between mystery, thriller and chiller, this is not a film that aims to have you jump back into your seat.

The main writer – Ivan Stanislavsky – is known more for comedies. He was responsible for Predators from three years ago and this is a wacky comedy crime caper.

The cast, on the other hand, is an ensemble one composed of performers notable for their involvement in this film genre.

The 38-year-old Nizhny-Novgorod born Ekaterina Vilkova resurrects her tough-but-endangered police investigator from the TV series Cold Shores. Likewise, the 48-year-old from Tallinn – Kirill Kyaro -appeared in Teach Me to Live (2016) and the TV series The Consultant (2017) as a psychiatrist and finds himself once again typecast in that role.

Detector is not set in Yakutia but in the more relatable (to many) edges of Moscow and, whilst not as exotic, the bare trees and snowy expanse of this do enhance the foreboding mood that the story builds up. Also, the setting in a four storey luxury dacha (which – Fun Fact –was the one built and lived in by the cosmonaut Alexey Leonev, no less!)

Juvenile messenger.

Viktoria, a police operative (Vilkova) is on the chase for a cold-blooded murderer. Ignoring advice from her colleagues, she enters a derelict building where he may be present. It is when she discovers a headless corpse that she is lunged at from behind and then slashed in the belly a few times. Her assailant leaves her for dead.

Viktoria recovers but is traumatized and has to accept the fact that she can never bear children. In the meantime, however, she has fallen in love with her psychotherapist. Novel is a wealthy man and she shacks up with him in his plush dacha beyond the capital.

Kyaro and Vilkova as the Ideal Couple in an aspirational abode [KG-Portal.ru]

On deciding to adopt a child they pay a visit to an orphanage. While they are looking, a head nurse shows a drawing made by one of the children. It depicts a brutal attack on a woman. Viktoria is struck by how much it reminds her of her own ordeal She decides there and then that the orphan who produced this is the one that they will take.

Dasha seems an odd and withdrawn child and this may owe to the fact that her own mum and dad perished in a domestic conflagration. She continues to produce sinister sketches – even putting them on the walls of her room. Viktoria is convinced that they depict scenes involving the murderer that she had been hunting.

Is the girl clairvoyant or does she have some kind of inside knowledge?

Viktoria returns to her police colleagues full of stories. She is met with unenthused doubts but, perhaps out of loyalty, they do assign a young investigator – Kostya (Gela Meskhi) to the case.

Together they find themselves running up against a series of blind alleys while Viktoria’s obsessive quest puts a strain on her relationship. Indeed, Novel has long since decided that Dasha should be sent back to her orphanage. When the girl stabs him in the hand matters come to the boil….

Distraction by numbers.

The bare bones of the premise do call to mind Olga Gorodetska’s supernatural thriller from 2019 Stray. However, Detector then takes an almost opposite direction. In fact, the plot could almost be a truncated season of Cold Shores. As is the way with this subgenre there is a final reveal that intends to induce gasps of shock but which can be seen coming.

Light on message, heavy on atmosphere.

The tagline for this film is `Take a Closer Look at Who You Live With`. That might, in fact, be the sole insight that one can take away from what is a rather domestic and insular thriller. Wider resonances about Russia or of the world Out There are hard to find here. That in fact may be part of the film’s appeal. I myself savored all one hour forty minutes of this creepy detective yarn, with parts that might have been written by Chat GPT but which oozed a well sustained macabre ambience throughout.

Indeed, the online user reviews, which more often than not are given over to sneering and cynicism have been positive and almost gushing for once.

For example, a Dmitry, writing on Megacritic.ru had this to say:

`The film `Detector` makes the viewer sit on the edge of the chair….The plot is unusual and unexpected…and the actors played their roles perfectly…Her [Vika’s] experiences and emotions are conveyed to the viewer so vividly that it is difficult not to be interested in what is happening on the screen…

And so on. This review was not an exception.

Nevertheless, in the cinema in Almaty (in a district calling itself `Moscow`) I found myself, for the umpteenth time, to be the only person in the hall.

Main image: Kladez Zolota. Livejournal.com

ALL SOUND AND FURY: THE FILM MIRA

THIS APOCALYPSE YARN, FILMED ON LOCATION IN RUSSIA’S FAR EAST, IMPRESSES WITH ITS BANGS AND WHIZZES – BUT WHERE’S THE SUBSTANCE?

Last December, an ambitious extravaganza, part disaster movie and part science fiction epic, reached Russian screens in time for the winter holidays. (I would have to wait another three months for it to get to Almaty in Kazakhstan).

MIRA after spending a lot of time on the launch pad, came caparisoned with illustrious associations.

Dmitry Kiselyov (not to be confused with the execrable T.V pundit of the same name) was the man with the megaphone. His resume shows that he helped to edit the iconic NIGHTWATCH and DAYWATCH films (2004 and 2006) and directed the quintessential family adventure-romance BLACK LIGHTNING in 2009. He has also taken us into the cosmos before with FIRST TIME (2013), a credible biopic of the first man to walk in space, Alexei Leonov.

One of the key roles is filled by a fifty-year-old Ukrainian Jew Anatoly Bely, a well-regarded stage actor who also has appeared in a great many television serials. He acts alongside a relative newcomer – Veronika Ustinova. Hailing from Ulyanosk, this seventeen-year-old has been compared by some to Margot Robbie. Here she showcases her talents as the cosmonaut’s daughter.

The film needs an epic score to complement its scenario and Yuri Poteenko is just the man for this. He also provided the score for NIGHTWATCH and DAYWATCH and has form with disaster movies in the form of METRO (2013).

Girl interrupted.

In Vladivostok, Lera, a fifteen-year-old malcontent, lives with a divorced mother and her paunchy lummox of a new stepfather and an exasperating younger brother. Only in her races – she runs for events in a local stadium -does she come alive.

However, her father, Arabs, works as a cosmonaut and spends much time in orbit with his Russian colleagues in a space station called Mira A. With the futuristic assistance of an A.I computer – with the titular nickname of Mira -this absent father is able to manipulate technologies down on earth and thus keep watch over his daughter. Unimpressed by this, Lera gives the middle finger to a street C.C.T.V camera that Arabs has commandeered in this fashion.

A hard rain.

Scientists on board Mir A have been attempting to warn those down below of an impending cosmic hazard in the form of a cluster of meteorites en route for our blue planet. (The actor Igor Kriphunov, best known for his work with Svyatelsav Podgaevsky, has a well-cast cameo role here.)

Their warnings meet with deaf ears….When the meteorites arrive, they disable the Mir. A space station and kill most of the staff, leaving only Arabs and Mira functioning.

Meanwhile Vladivostok is laid waste by the onslaught and Lera is rendered homeless and loses her little brother. It is here that the father and Mira’s creepy magic takes centre stage and a new father-daughter bond is forged. Together, using whatever visual and sound portal they can find, they relocate the lost brother and, while they are at it, also prevent an off shore tanker from detonating and taking half of Vladivostok with it.

Defiance of odds.

MIRA seems to lay down a heroic ethos. We learn that Lera exhibits a phobia of fire and that this originated from a time she was trapped in a burning lift, which her father could not rescue her from. This time, though, she will have to face down this terror – by joining forces with her dad.

Even her boyfriend – with something of a `woke` twist – boasts a prosthetic arm and must overcome the feeling of stigma this gives him.

Aside from motivational homilies, what can we take away from this tale? That remote parenting can work? That surveillance technologies might be used for the betterment of humanity?

Convincing mayhem.

I took this film in on the second row in a hall in the Chaplin cinema in Megapolis, Almaty. This featured a sizeable screen with Sensurround and, whilst I have never been one to salivate over FX the collision sequences in this film – all falling masonry, explosions and skidding vehicles – were among the most effective I have experienced.

Carboard cutouts.

If only the human input had been as animated. Ustinova delivers a performance which exudes dignity and seems believable and she represents the discovery of a new female lead in cinema. The rest of the cast, however, function as cyphers of family types: the caring but out of touch mother, the annoying but cute little brother and the cloddish but well-meaning stepfather.

Even Bely feels, in a strange way, insipid as though he had found that the script had not given him enough scope. Instead, he puts on dark glasses whenever he needs to convey a bit of character.

Perhaps this explains why MIRA, despite having some affecting scenes, stopped short of jerking my tears as much as it intended. I can say, however, that it did earn my unflagging attention for all of its long 150 minutes running time.

Magpie approach.

Refreshing though the Vladivostok setting is, the film is otherwise a stitch up of borrowed ideas. The Hollywood offering ARMAGEDDON springs to mind as one of the models (meteor shower, Mir space station and father-daughter issues).

The creators did not only draw on American precedents though. The conceit that forms the science fictional hub of the whole thing – a space station with the capacity to gatecrash earth side technologies – recalls the ATTRACTION sequel INVASION (2020) where a sinister intelligence in orbit could do the same.

Unpleasant resonances.

Above all, the meteorite attack scenes could not help but to put me in mind of the horrific shelling of certain Ukrainian cities by the Russian military. This, together with the very name of the film (which means `peace` in Russian) could even cause some to suspect that this film has a subtext.

One man who might like to think so is Anatoly Bely himself. After denouncing the invasion of Ukraine, he left the Moscow Arts Theatre last summer and now resides in Israel.

TWO DARK HOMETRUTHS: the films `LIKE A MAN and SISTERS.

Marriage and the Male Mystique come under the spotlight in these two fresh psychological dramas.

This November a pair of cinematic dramas from Russia arrived in Kazakhstan to add to the winter chill. They seem to be plotting parallel vectors in that they both lay bare the murkier ends of what is expected of men and women in our times. They do so in an entertaining way, minus anything in the way of sociological agit-prop.

Po Muzhski – the title gets translated as either `Manly` or `Like A Man` (I prefer the latter) -was released by Central Partnership on November 10^th and seemed to come out of the blue with a rookie director and a lead actor best known for online comedies.

This is by no means a comedy, however. Indeed, it comes under the label of `drama-thriller` which is as good a pigeonhole as you can get. Nevertheless, there were a handful of people to see it at the Almaty cinema where I went and it has garnered appreciative responses from the online feedback forums.

Like a Man was directed by Maxim Kulagin who has been responsible for shorts until now. The protagonist Gleb, is the 36-year-old Anton Lapenko who hails from the Moscow satellite dormitory town of Zelenograd. A redoubtable talent, he created a fanbase with `Inside Lapenko` on Instagram – a satirical character driven comedy which draws comparisons with Monty Python.

The 34-year-old Ekaterina Shcherbakova takes the part of Gleb’s stunning wife Polina. (With exquisite irony she also turned up in the comedy (Not) Ideal Man from a few years ago).

Whilst the film triumphs in not featuring obvious villains, the 28-year-old actor Sergey Vasin, who has done television work before, portrays a chilling and believable low-life antagonist.

Gleb has it made in today’s Russia. A managerial-cum- entrepreneurial type, he is rewarded in the form of a moderne and swanky dacha on the outskirts of the city. He and his wife have invited some friends over and, while they quaff some choice wines, he cooks on a wok.

Then it happens. A local youth hurls a bag of rubbish into their enclosed back garden. The resulting confrontation with this man of lower economic status leads to Gleb’s wife getting slapped. Gleb responds in a rational manner by herding his party back into the dacha and away from further harm.

A spiral of descent on Gleb’s part ensues. He begins to watch instructional street fighting videos, start trying to lift weights beyond his capabilities at the gym, and takers up smoking again, roaming the streets to cadge a cigarette. Then he buys a gas gun….

True enough he does make some attempt to bring closure to the matter in a civilized way. He goes to speak in person to the miscreant and befriends the man’s wife. However, his own wife continues to feel under threat and his more hothead friends urge him to deal with this `gopnik` with less compromise. Soon the dividing line between his own behavior and that of his enemy becomes ever more blurred.

Clichés are eschewed: this is no Straw Dogs, despite some similarities. Even with Andrey Bugrov’s stormy score setting the mood, Like a Man does not revel in depictions of gratuitous violence.

In fact, there is – as they say – a lot to unpack here. What is foregrounded is the contradictory demands that a modern males face – still mired in his provider/protector role but not expected to display brute shows of strength -but there is also something here about the yawning chasm between the aspirational middle-classes and those who are less successful. Also, whisper it, but I found it hard not to view the film as functioning as some sort of parable concerning the Russo-Ukrainian conflict.

In any case, despite problems I had with the language level, I was kept rivetted throughout the film’s 105 minutes and it has stayed with me since.

Sisters.

This proved a hard film to get to see. The showing was in a far-flung, vast shopping mall in which the cinema was not signposted. Then the cinema itself failed to advertise that they were showing the film. In short, I reached the booth as the opening credits were rolling. I was alone in the place.

Sisters (Sestri) released this November, constitutes a thriller laced with fantasy elements and was directed by Ivan Petukhov who is responsible for many comedies (and has worked with Uma Thurman). However, in 2020 he was inspired by the quarantines to produce Locked Up which revolves around similar themes of isolation that Sisters involves.Released by Baselev’s Studio/Magic Production Studio and Event Horizon Company, the film provides a meaty role to Irina Starshenbaum (Invasion, Summer,Sherlock in Russia). As well as being Russia’s sweetheart she is a known opponent of Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine. As `creative director` she also must have had a fair bit of input into the product.

Another old hand of stage and screen (who also can be seen in Summer) joins her: Nikita Efremov.

The action opens in media res with Anya (Starshenbaum without cosmetics and looking a little older than her thirty-years) attempting to flee from further physical abuse from her businessman husband, Andrey, with a toddler in tow. Later, after her husband has left for work, she discovers that she has been locked into her flat. Then, in her attempt to reach out for online help she stumbles on a sisterhood who offer assistance. This coven of once abused women hide horrifying powers. They have the means to turn the tables on toxic men with a spot of human combustion….

Throughout the film’s 110 minutes the pace is slow and the mood unsettling. As with Like a Man what we get here is a domestic drama zooming in on the reactions of the main players.

Despite it’s 18 + certification, the cruelty and physical violation that forms the core of the tale is kept off the screen for the most part. Efremov plays Andrey with restraint: he seems calm and even loving at times and yet somehow menacing throughout.

Sisters represents an exercise in ambience. It is a spectral ambience brought about by the interplay of illumination and shadow in the photography and a celestial score from Misha Mishchenko (known for his work with the band Evendice) which provides the nucleus of this state-of-the-art Art Horror project.

The film was released to coincide with something called The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women and the director’s own comments and the statistics about domestic violence put up on the screen as the story closes all suggest that this has pretentions to being an `Issue Movie`. They seem to be trying to do for domestic violence in Russia what The China Syndrome did for the American nuclear industry – that is, blow the whistle on it.

Sisters is, for sure, unsentimental about life in Russia right now yet I am not so sure that its intended message will seep through. Something more social realist than magical realist might have fared better. Then again, Gogol’s The Overcoat – a ghost story – raised the question of lower-middle class poverty in its time.

The bigger question is this: will those interested in the West ever get to see these important films now?

Lead image: Kinomail.ru

Daydream trippers.

REVERSIBLE REALITY is an all too plausible glimpse of the future but offers no surprises – however, it is as timely as hell

The teaser for this `fantasy thriller` enjoins us to picture a world where you can -among other things -`settle scores with a hated boss…all without consequences`. Indeed, in the dark but comic opening scene an overwrought employee does just that. The street below his office gets littered with the corpses of his repeatedly vanquished boss in his virtual fantasy.

Dmitry Konstantinov, the 57 year old director-cum-screen writer responsible for Reversible Reality (Obratimaya Realnost) has a history of involvement in crime thrillers. For all its being set a few decades hence and tickling us with some wacky science, this is another one.

This 84 minute film got a 12+ certificate release this year, two years after its completion. It incorporates noir elements alongside a boardroom thriller within a science fiction framework. Some bankable actors have added the icing on the cake by adding their names to it. Heartthrob Pavel Chinarev provides the lead and the multi-award winning Timofey Tribuntsev (The Island, 2006) makes a great theatrical bad guy. Meanwhile the alt-pop outfit Mojento lay on some musical interludes.

Virtual addiction.

The film is a glimpse of a hyperurbanised Russia of tomorrow. Here Virtual Reality know-how has advanced to the degree where pundits can immerse themselves in interactive parallel realities.

A Virtual Reality corporation called New Life has found itself riding on the crest of a wave of demand for its services. Citizens are content to vegetate in their free time, with what are called `Adventures`, tightrope walking across a gorge, scoring a goal for a major football team and so on instead of hiking and dating.

Blissed out commuters enjoying their Adventure.[En.Kinorium.com]

However, glitches are starting to appear and these sweet dreams are starting to become more like nightmares as a cell opposed to virtual living have found a way to hack into the system. Is the grand scheme of New Life in jeopardy?

Cybercop.

Enter Mihail (Chinarev). A specialist in online crimes, he gets tasked with infiltrating New Life as an employee and to seek and destroy the `antivirts`. Suspicion has fallen on one Vika, an employee of the company who commits such flagrant breaches of propriety as reading hard copy books on the metro (Zamyatin’s We, no less!)

Mikhail though is soon mesmerized by Vika’s gamine charms. With her as his new squaw he begins to uncover New Life corporation’s dastardly plot to extend its powers. (They are even confiscating people’s household pets the better to minimize any competition with their Adventures!) In the process the boss of the corporation is clubbed to death – or so it seems – and the fingers all point to Mikhail.

This multilayered whodunnit is rolled out with a fast pace and much talk. The septic New World was one that I haver seen countless times before – not least inBladerunner with its nocturnal cityscapes overseen by vast video displays. The technological marvels of it are kept to a wise minimum – although the downloading of Mikhail’s mind into the body of the boss – will play a part in what transpires.

Fifty costumes were designed for this show. Their sleek quality adds to the general texture of the film as do the transparent computer screens. The virtual reality appliances are represented by a bar of light hovering before the punter’s eyes.

The actors seem to be doing their own thing, but in a good way. Chinarev is a fisticuff trader whose bedroom features models of motorbikes. Tribuntsev acts his socks off as the despotic CEO (as well as others who come to inhabit his body). Vera Kolesnikova (100 Days of Freedom, 2018) is doll faced and impassive and it is easy to see how Mikhail could become spellbound by her. We also get a cheering cameo from Vladimir Yumatov who plays a seedy antediluvian sleuth given to announcing his presence with a loud blowing of his nose.

Old World Futureworld.

Overall this conformist and automated anti-utopia took me back to Hollywood films from two decades back such as Equilibrium and Minority Report (both from 2002). I found this to be a bedrock of reassurance. The theme explored here is a very old one (one could go back to Huxley’s `feelies` in Brave New World from a century ago) and one far from reassuring, but the film engages with it in a style and format I could relate to with ease.

About time.

The appearance of Reversible Reality in the cinemas seemed like an answer to a call. The news is full of stuff about how Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual reality scheme – Meta – is faltering owing to over-investment and people are losing their jobs because of it. Perhaps you and I are not so willing to trade in our old real lives for new virtual ones. Perhaps, like Mikhail and Vika at the close of the movie, we would rather be sitting on an actual boat floating down an actual river on an actual summer’s evening. In an interview for Kinoteatr.ru Chinarev commented:

` After all, we look into the monitor screens more than we do each other’s eyes`

Postscript. I have received news that the release of Hamlet Dulyan’s long awaited adaptation of Evgeny Zamyatin’s influential dystopia WE has yet again been cancelled. (It was supposed to reach cinemas on December 1st of this year following many delays). No reason has been forthcoming. This echoes the cancellattion of the release of the film EMPIRE V (From the Viktor Pelevin novel) last March.This represents a disturbing new trend in Post February 2022 Russian cultural life.

The lead image is from Mobilelegends.net

SPACE CORN: STAR MIND reviewed.

Russia’s much awaited Space Adventure film arrives at last. But haven’t we seen it all somewhere before?

STAR MIND (Syesdni Razoom) had been in the offing for half a decade before it made it into the Russian cinemas on January 6^th this year, doing so amidst precious little in the way of public poster campaigns or journalistic coverage (which may account for my seeing it in an almost empty cinema hall).

STAR MIND constitutes a 98-minute-long `adventure fantasy` certified at 12^+.Whilst its trailers seem to promise a horror, it would be more accurate to view it as pure (`hard`) science fiction laced with some thriller and action elements.

R.D Studios, who focus on the science fiction, horror and fantasy genres and who brought us Abigail (2019) are behind it.

The 38-year-old man with the megaphone Vyacheslav Lisnevsky, who worked on the fantasy drama Eclipse from 2017 here directs a young cast of relative unknowns.

The main protagonist, Doctor Steve Ross, is played by Egor Koreshkov. Russian television viewers will know him for his role in the series Eighties this year and he stars in the much-anticipated future world drama We due out this year. Alena Konstantinova supplies the love interest. Other players include Dmitry Frid, Alexander Kuznetsov (who sadly died before this film was released) and – it is interesting to see – a `woman of colour` in the form of Liza Martinez.

The picture, shot in the more futuristic areas of Moscow and in Charyn Canyon in Kazakhstan, represents something of a test case. We already know that Russia has the capability to roll out some credible science-fiction blockbusters because of the precedents of Inhabited Island (1 and 2) and Invasion (2020). STAR MIND however, consists of an off-world space adventure requiring even more lavish visual effects. Can Russian cinema meet this challenge?

Interrupted Quest.

The film opens a decade or so hence with the Earth in the grip of an ecological virus which takes a malign toll on the biosphere leading to plants and animals perishing and our planet becoming ever more uninhabitable.

In the midst of this, however, strange artefacts get discovered in caves around the world. These take the form of orbs and hail from we know not where. Doctor Ross is the man who learns how to activate them. It appears that they function as `seeders` and are able to make planets with oxygen and water even more able to cradle new life.

It is he who sets up Project Gemini. The mission of this is to seek out Earth’s twin planets and then terraform them using these orbs, thus finding a new habitat for humanity.

Egor Koreshkov as Doctor Steven Ross [Kinofilmpro.ru]

A team of men – and one Afro-Caribbean woman -and he take a shuttle through an intergalactic wormhole set for just such a planet.

Meanwhile, via flashbacks, we learn that the good doctor has a complicated relationship with a woman back on Earth who is pregnant by him (a romantic subplot which will go on to gain significance).

The ship carries them off course and they arrive at a planet they had not planned to – which nevertheless seems to have the right credentials for terraforming. All the while, a slimy critter has been a stowaway with them, hiding in the orb that they had taken on-board with them (Because – because…whatever). This tentacled monster is now at loose in the ship, picking off the crew, and with its own plans for the new planetary home….

We can see that this storyline is not the product of a lengthy brainstorming lunch. In fact, it is a stitching together of Interstellar (2014) and the Alien franchise (from 1979). The scriptwriters have made some attempts to put their own stamp on things. The life-spreading orbs are a fresh creation and there is a twist concerning the monster: it is a robot.

Dejavu.

The iconography of STAR MIND seems all rather familiar. We have ship with chunky steel doorways and crepuscular interiors with plenty of brightly lit consoles, and a cast of uniformed young men -and one black woman (who is given to running about in her underwear – Ripley style). The new planet too is all craggy and rocky in its terrain.

The technology on show seems like an odd clash of the current and the fantastical. The crew’s spaceship is a shuttle much like the ones employed by NASA in the present day and it is blasted off in a rocket also like the ones we know and are used to. Later, however the ship enters an` interdimensional wormhole` type thing of a much more extravagant nature.

The most jarring aspect of the film is the fact that all the characters are known by Western names. All the signs and computer readouts are in English too. Even the inclusion of a black woman can be taken as an attempt to underscore the impression that this is an American crew rather than any move towards diversity.

K.D Studios seem to be leaving nothing to chance: they are casting their net for the widest demographic which means the Anglosphere and having a 12+ certificate.

The problem here is that all the production team’s grey matter seems to have been expended on the – quite striking – visual impact of the film but at the expense of the plot and characterization. It is like an ornate chocolate box housing mediocre chocolate.

Popcorny.

That being said STAR MIND does retain some charms. Taken as a creature-feature it faces stiff competition from its compatriots in the form of Kola Superdeep (2020) and Sputnik (2020) and cannot even begin to compete. It does, nevertheless, feature some tense sequences: the frozen body of one of the crew slams into the window of their craft, the monster punches its way through the reinforced steel doorways and so on.

Also, while the ideas in the film may be second-hand, these ideas are interesting and do inform the events in the film.

STAR MIND may not be the epic that it promised to be. It is more of a popcorn-friendly B-movie, but is none the worse for that. There is even something endearing in its desperation to please its demographic. I am reminded more of the film Life (2017) more than anything else.

The Russian online feedback to its debut seems divided. Some claim to be duly impressed by the professionalism of its production values. They are in the minority however. There are much more couch critics who sneer at the film’s copycat nature.

Perhaps we should not worry too much. STAR MIND has demonstrated that the Russian film industry can muster up a respectable space adventure to match anything of the kind from Hollywood. Next time they just need to make sure that everyone knows that it is Russian!

The Western title will be PROJECT GEMINI [Kinopoisk.Ru]

Lead image:Datavyhoda.ru

PHANTOMS OF THE CRIMEA: REVIEW OF THE FILM `GUESTS`.

A routine paranormal drama tastefully delivered with pleasing locations and sets.

Like many less supported Russian cinema releases GUESTS was alloted a desultory run at the cinemas. I have only just caught up with it now in DVD form (which had to be ordered at that). 2019 – the year that GUESTS was put on the market already feels like a distant era. Then you could travel where you liked and mixing in groups was unproblematic (both things form the backbone of this film).

Part of a lineage.

GUESTS , a 16+ certificate 88 minute long film by Emotion Films, represents a formulaic ghost chiller of the young-people-in-an-abandoned -old-house type. The promotional poster boasts that the picture is from the same producers that brought us the chillers Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite and The Route is Built, both from 2016 .Indeed the names Georgy Malkov,Vladimir Polyskov and Danil Makhort all appear, among others, in the roll call of the producers of all these films.

Evgeny Abusov is a man you would not have predicted would have been behind the camera. Little would you know from this film that this director is better known for his comedies.

The leading role is taken by Angelina Stretchina, whose persona here is quite apart from the spunky dreadlocked tough girl she played in Queen of Spades2:Through the Looking Glass (released in the same year). The Dzhezkagan born 44 year old prolific actor Yuri Chursin brings class to the proceeding as the would -be romantic interest.

The screenplay was by Sergey Ageev who also worked on First Time (2017) a biopic concerning Alexei Leonev, the first man to space walk.

A special shout out should go to Alexandra Fatina, the photographer. She has provided the visual element to other ghost stories such as Envelope (2017) and here enriches this story with the special flavour of its location. Indeed the Black Sea coast location shots do much to impart a special character to what, on paper, seems a run-of-the-mill supernatural yarn.

Katya (Stretchina), who seems a rather timid, even frosty young woman, is working as a waitress in a cafe on the Crimean coast as the summer draws to an end. Her colleague introduces her to a new crowd. These are a gang of young hedonists whose idea of a good time is to find a property where they can lay on a private techno-rave, with one of their number being a professional DJ. Furthermore one of the men in the group takes an immediate interest in Katya.

The old dark house.

Rather against her own better judgement Katya directs their attention to an unoccupied old mansion on the coast that she knows of. (From a costume drama style prologue we know this to have been the lair of a local occultist back at the turn of the century). Soon the crew are partying in the property that they have squatted in, and trying not to think too much about the old textbooks about demonology that they have found about the place.

It is then that the long absent current owner bursts in on the scene. Andrei (Churshin) is a desperate man and he seems deranged enough for the men in the group to overtpower him and imprison him in the cellar. Then we learn that Katya had had an unconsummated tryst with this strange man when she had worked as a home-help at the mansion earlier. She begs them to release Andrei. Upon returning to the cellar, however they find that he has vanished….

Then the spirits of the house begin to make themselves known. A black ooze begins to disgorge from the walls. A phantom woman and satanic boy- child are seen. They have extendable talons and a tendency to hiss like angry cats.

Sedate.

The narrative pace is slow with many drawn out scenes. For example one long sequence just involves the youths poking around their new found prop erty. Jump scares are few and indeed even denied in scenes where you might expect one. Likewise there is no blood and guts. A young woman is impaled on a tree branch after being flung into the air by an angry spirit but we see very little. The most effective sequences are as low key as they are low tech: An unnoticed child stamds stock still in a doorway gazing in a baleful way at a room full of self-absorbed dancers.

Otherwise GUESTS constitutes a a cascade of spook paraphenalia: a seance, figures glimpsed in bathroom mirrors, people being levitated and so on. However, the real take-away from it all is the aesthetic appeal. We get stunning shots of the coast early on and then when we go indoors it’s all the muted browns and pastel green shades of an antique interior. Lovely.

Then Mark Dorbsky’s unobtruxive but brooding score reinforces the dreaminess of it all.

Here we get shown the Snapchat generation meeting their doom after kicking the hornets nest of a much older Crowleyesque set. Within that we get the usual kinds of tropes about obsessive love surviving death, the need for jusrice to be restored after so long and so on.

A shoulder shrug from compatriots.

What of the genertion this film is aimed at? Hating on their own domestic cinema is something of a Russian past-time so it comes as no surprise to find, for instance, someone calling herself `Kosmonaut Misha` on Otzovik.com, in a piece entitled `I’m sorry I saw this`:

There is an atmosphere, but it is an aymosphere of stupidity and absurdity

Yet some people appreciate these more subdued slow burners. GUESTS belongs to the same spectral category as the Spanish film The Others (2001). It might seem anodyne in comparison with the circus thrills on offer from other glitzier films but it works on its own terms. This is by no means a breakthrough film, but a stepping stone towards a cinema genre that Russia remains quite new to.

Lead image: Film.Ru

EASY TARGET: The dubious appeal of THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER.

DON’T BREATHE, the American horror thriller from five years back featured a crusty elder fighting back against youthful miscreants. The Russians get there first with VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER . Except that this is no horror movie, and the old guy is the hero!

I have hinted before that there exists a glut of gun wielding tough guy shows on Russian television. Every now and then something impressive shows up from this overcrowded market. COLD SHORES (out on Starmedia last year) – not, I admit a typical cops and robbers yarn – did boast some high production values and could have been summarised as `Russia-pulls-off Scandanavian noir`.

If you dig back a few decades,there could be some other contenders. THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER (1999) has been broadcas a few times on the TV 1000 Russian film channel of late. Despite my grave misgivings about it, it must be a tribute to its witchcraft that I had not intended to ever write about it, but find myself doing just that!

A product of the closing years of the tumultuous nineties, this film is no Bright Young Debut. The producer was Stanislav Govorukhin, a director best known for his iconic T.V seriesThe MEETING PLACE CANNOT BE CHANGED from 1979.

The leading role was filled by none other than Mikhail Ulyanov, a grand old man of stage and screen, who, among much else, was Dmitry Karamazov in the 1968 rendition of THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.

Furthermore, the film is an adaptation of a novel by Victor Pronin, a leading doyen of crime fiction, called WOMEN ON WEDNESDAYS published four years earlier than the film.

For all these august connections,THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER can be pigeonholed in the Michael Winner-style Vigilantes Revenge crime subgenre that causes such righteous tut-tutting – and for sound reasons.

Yet AFISHA magazine (a hard copy culture review zine from 1999 to 2015) ranked it among a 100 major Russian motion pictures.

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER details in its 95 minutes one septugenarian’s victory over some of the lawlessness of the early post-Soviet years. It is set amongst `ordinary people` in provincial Russia. (They filmed it in Kaluga, a town some 150 kilometres southwest of Moscow, now known for the Tsiolovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics).

Scenes from provincial life in THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER [Kininews.ru]

GRAMP’S REVENGE.

Ivan Afonin (Ulyanov) seems a respectable former railway worker and veteran who cares for his grand-daughter alone in a modest flat. Nearby, in the neighbourhood, live a trio of young `New Russians`. With well connected parents, these young men spend most of their time boozing and – on Wednesdays – paying for sex. They blast out rock music, drive fancy cars and one of them is a student of Structural Linguistics.

One summer’s Wednesday evening they find themselves without a female plaything and, from their balcony, catch sight of Ivan’s grandaughter in an alluring short skirt and high heels. Exuding a certain vivacious charm, one of them invites her to a `birthday party` and she goes upstairs to join them.

A gang rape ensues with all three involved. Ivan, on discovering the degradation visited on his kith and kin is devastated. He takes the usual route at first of calling the police.

The police response is rather brutal. They barge their way into the boy’s flat on a pretence of being neighbours then separate the boys and threaten them until one makes a confession.

What happens next is that the father of one of the youths shows up. He is a high-ranking policeman and, displeased as he is by his son, shuts down any further investigation.

`You’ve invaded our land` Ivan tells one functionary when he learns this. He then turns to the black market in search of a big enough gun. (`Look at what television is doing to old people these days` remarks one tradesman after turning him down). However, he finds an S.V.D rifle complete with viewfinder and an all inportant silencer – and people shady enough to be willing to sell it. When he gives it a trial run, he seems such a good shot that they compare him to someone from the Voroshilovsky regiment (A Second World War military unit with legendary marksmanship abilities).

On alternate Wednesdays he picks off the rapists one-by-one from the vantage point of a flat which the old man is looking after while the tenant is away – and which happens to be opposite the boy’s place.

The first young turk gets a bullet in the groin as he holds a bottle of champagne between his legs – and the event is assumed to be due to an exploding champagne bottle at first. He is thus castrated.

The second one is sitting in his car when it becomes an inferno owing to a shot at the petrol tank. The third one suffers a breakdown into insanity as he awaits his fate and shoots his own father – the very one who had stymied the case -in a state of paranoia.

All the while our gunman is posing as an enfeebled old duffer oblivious to the drama which he is creating. Furthermore, he attracts a Guardian Angel in the form of a sympathetic cop who stashes away the gun just before his senior colleagues come searching for it.

The vigilante rifleman is the unequivocal good-guy of this film. [recommend.ru]

Vengeance porn.

By all accounts Pronin’s novel featured a political dimension, with the shooter taking up arms on behalf of the `little people` and in opposition to the post-Yeltsin `New Russians`. This aspect is, for the most part, lost in this film. The title, as well as the promotional poster, foregrounds the old man as the Hero. His tormentors meanwhile, are rock music playing pantomime villains (if very well acted).

The violence too is a form of bloodthirsty poetic justice: for example, in the novel the first victim is shot in the leg, not the genitals.

Then there is the sexualisation of the female victim. We are treated to shots of her legs so that, before the distressing rape sequence, we feel somewhat titillated.

This is no Horror film then. Nor is it a Revenge Tragedy in the Jacobean tradition. Nor a call for us to ponder on how `violence begets violence` or somesuch issue. Ivan is set up as the clear Hero of the story and we are invited to relish in his cathartic act of disproportionate revenge.

22 year’s old and still popular to this day- but how much has this film contributed to a runaway gun culture in Russia? {prdisk.ru]

So it is no surprise that there are some who have treated this entertainment as though it were an instruction manual. For instance, In 2008, 57 year old Aleksander Mansurov was jailed for murder after he had shot two people, one of whom had allegedly raped his daughter, in a village near Rostov-On-Don. (Such tit-for-tat brutality may become more rare as gun control measures are being put in place following the school shooting that occured in Kazan back in May of this year).

THE VOROSHILOVSKY SHOOTER keeps you watching throughout and then stays with you. I, for one, feel sullied by the moral vacuum at the heart of it though.

Lead image: Vkontakt.

EXHUMATION.

Dug up from the late Soviet graveyard – a still fresh werewolf yarn.

Having been AWOL for some 31 years CHAS OBOROTNYA leapt from its coffin this year. A shadowy fan group calling itself From Outer Space -Vasily and Gleb on Vkontakte – managed to source this one hour and 27-minute-long made for television curio.

Post-Soviet casualty.
A direct translation of the title would be something like Hour of change or Hour of Reversal both of which strike me as both rather good titles in themselves, yet the over-explanatory title The Hour of the Werewolf seems to have prevailed.
Tonnis TV – who were superseded four years ago by Direct -produced it and it was broadcast, once only, by All Union Cable Television in 1990. Following this there were a few hard copy DVDs of the programme around in Moscow and St Petersburg but otherwise it vanished into the ether.
That is until the above mentioned fan group hunted it down and found it quivering in the vaults of the State Film Fund. They then put it out there last April in the form of a YouTube post – with English subtitles to boot.

This film embodies something distinctive having been shot in the Soviet Ukraine in the northern Black Sea region – Odessa no less. The director’s role was taken by a 31-year-old Igor Shevchenko and the company he was working for had been only going for a year. So, we have youthfulness and an interesting locale at play here. An experienced cast helped too.

Mikhail Pakhomenko, the lead, had already been presented with an Honour of the Artist of the RSFSR three years earlier.
Alexander Baluev, playing Grigory’s son, would eight years later have a role in the Hollywood film Deep Impact as a cosmonaut. Marina Starykh, the would-be love interest, is a very busy small screen actress never off Russian television screens.
Man on the brink.
The events occur in a provincial Russian town during one of those sweltering summers that this country specializes in. Grigory Maksimovich works a s a reporter for a local newspaper and, in late middle-age has become a widower.
The newspaper’s one-time editor has absconded leaving his post open. All to aware of his advancing years, Grigory has set his sights on becoming the new chief editor. However, a younger colleague functions as his rival in this ambition.
Meanwhile Grigory keeps a keen eye on a typesetting colleague called Taya, a friendly and desirable woman. Another co-worker, a party chairman presents himself as something of a confidante for Grigory before being unmasked as a man indulging in office politics. (In 1990 such a negative portrayal of a party cadre could well have seemed quite significant).
Otherwise superstition still hangs on in this backwater (The full Moon is a good time to make pickles Taya tells Grigory only half in jest). Howling is heard in the night and a werewolf on the loose gets whispered about. A Dog’s Gate – a sort of wooden structure formed from three intertwined boughs forms part of the local architecture. Grigory, good Soviet man that he is, will have none of it.
How ignorant people are, he tells the party chairman. They read about perestroika in the morning and gossip about evil spirits in the evening.

A rare DVD of `The Hour of the Werewolf`
[auction.ru]

It is shortly after this remark, however, that the journalist is set upon a mysterious black dog just as he is boarding the last tram home. It has taken a chunk out of the man’s ankle….

Metamorphosis.
During the long, balmy nights Grigory undergoes slow and painful transformations. This rational and cultured Soviet citizen will transition into a fanged, four-legged marauder. Furthermore, like Mr. Hyde, in this form he will hunt down his daytime bugbears. (I had to double check that this film came out four years before the Jack Nicholson vehicle and parable of middle-aged revenge – Wolf) His young rival for the office of Editor falls from a stairwell window fleeing the hound, Taya’s other lover and Taya herself are set upon in bed and the party Chairman is duly mauled.

Now a tortured Raskolnikov figure, Grigory attempts to tie himself to his bed at night and hopes that his terrible dreams are but premonitions.
It will be his own son , ahard-nosed young policeman (Alexander Baluev) ,who will unbeknownst to himself, execute his own father – and not with any silver bullets.

Marina Starykh getting an unwelcome visitor. [Kino Poisk]

Twist.
The Dog’s Gate lore was new to me but, otherwise The Hour of the Werewolf pays obeisance to the expected lycanthropy tropes. Under the full moon the transformation scenes are economic but effective, when combined: distorting camera lenses, an impressive array of vampiric fangs, a wolfman mask and a black dog.
The summer setting sets the ambience apart from the usual wintriness of such tales (even if a bit of fake mist is added to some scenes).
The portentous synthesizer mood music courtesy of Artemy Artemiev, – sometimes Bach type organ chords and Giorgio Moroder style rhythmic pulsing -dates the production as much as the electric typewriters do.

Zeitgeist.
There are no heroes in this kitchen sink supernatural thriller, except Grigory seems like a decent man engulfed by his Id. In this though he is not alone in this (the film seems to suggest)as the Soviet Union embarks on perestroika.
A tramp is shown being hurled onto the ground after attempting to join in a street party. A subplot involves sordid money-grubbing as Grigory’s son ties to reclaim some cash that his late mother had lent to a miscreant.
There is a comic interlude involving a satirised hustler in the form of a young would-be poet on a desperate look out for employment with the newspaper. (When asked what workshop he comes from he replies: Frankly a poetical one…actually I’m an operator at the water tower.)
The action climaxes in a scene of social disintegration as residents wait in the night at a furniture warehouse for their names to be called so that they may collect ordered house household items.
The Hour of the Werewolf packs oodles of charm with its nostalgic ambience and relatable protagonist. Of course, to judge the show’s production values with fairness you would have to set it against other Western made for television movies produced that same period.. When you do so, it does not come out looking so bad.

Main image: horrorzone.

`SHERLOCK IN RUSSIA`: HOLMES FINDS HIS HEART IN SAINT PETERSBURG.

IN THIS AMBITIOUS BUT PREDICTABLE DARK FANTASY SERIES THE WORLD’S BEST KNOWN SLEUTH IS ON THE TRAIL OF THE RIPPER IN RUSSIA’S CULTURAL CAPITAL. BUT, WAIT…ARE THOSE TEARS?

Embrace the chaos, Mr Holmes!

One thing that enlivened a dull pandemic was the fact that some people were doling out free face masks in some metro stations in Moscow. These promotionals were swish black items featuring the legend Sherlock v Rossi – Sherlock in Russia.

Sherlock in Russia AKA Sherlock: the Russian Chronicles represents the latest uncalled for addition to the overstretched Sherlock Holmes smorgasbord. This 18+ period-mystery-action show reached Russia on October 6th this year as part of the Moscow International Film Festival. Then it would infect a wider audience through being offered as a weekly subscription by START Video Service. The series was shown every Thursday in 52 minute long episodes until December 3rd.

Millenial iconoclasm.
It has been open season on the august occupant of 221b Baker Street since the turn of the millenium if not before. The Soviet Union, despite seeming to be steadfast in opposition to Western imperialism and so on, did at least distinguish itself with its fidelity to the Arthur Conan-Doyle scripture. The television series filmed by Lenfilm and running from 1979 to 1986 called The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is viewed by many afiocandos of the cult fiction to be among the Gold Standards.

The post-communist Russian Federation, however, has come out fighting with its own sacriligeous pop culture variants on the Sherlock mythos to match those of Britian and America.

Thus seven years back one Igor Petrenko embodied Sherlock Holmes in a television drama called just that (produced by Rossiya1 and Central Partnership). He seemed more like a poet than a detective the reviewer Kim Newman said of his portrayal (Wikipedia).

This fare, however, still held onto the apron strings of the traditional canon; Sherlock Holmes in Russia all but dispenses with it. In that regard, the clearest precedent for this would seem to be Guy Ritchie’s 2009 shameless make-over of the cerebral icon as the sort of youthful, dapper action hero that could be played by Robert Downey Junior (Sherlock Holmes, Warner Bros, 2009).

Illustrious names.
A 55 year old conceptual artist from Sverdlosk comprises one of the culprits for this show. A member of the infamous Blue Noses Art Group no less, Alexander Shaburov also penned a series entitled The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes between 1991 and 1992.
Then the prolific fifty year-old screen writer Oleg Malovichko – who worked on this year’s breakthrough film Sputnik among many other prominent releases – transmuted these sketches into something watcheable.

Then a bankable star to don the dear-stalker and hold the pipe was the only other thing that was needed. Step forward the 38 year-old Svetly born Maxim Matvyeev – who appeared in Stilyagi in 2008 and played Vronsky in a TV adaptation of Anna Karenina three years ago .

Artifice.
Despite being filmed on location in Saint Petersburg, the scenes exude an overall contrived appearance with a crepescular ochre-burnt orange shade to everything. The iconography reminded me of the look of Viktor Frankenstein, the British film from 2015.

Matvyeev’s Holmes could not be further from the classic late middle-aged sexually ambigous representation of him. This actor is a screen idol type in the Danila Kozlovsky mould. He plays him with a trimmed beard and a floppy fringe and demonstrating cuddly emotions. He even blows on his magnifying glass as though it were a smoking gun.

Other nods to our brave new world include jerky camera shots and, at one early point, a cretinous glitch in the matrix in the form of a snatch of music from Britney Spears’s Toxic ! (We can be grateful that the otherwise more appropriate sepulchural soundtrack is by Ryan Otter for most of the proceedings).

On the hunt for a legend.
The breakneck paced action opens in rain-soaked back alleys of East London. Somebody (who at least has the decency to wear a mask) is trawling the alleways with knife crime on his mind. He is closing in on a quarry, when:
Hello, Mr Ripper, allow me to introduce myself.... comes the opening line of You Know Who. Telegenic fisticuffs then ensue. Watson comes to the rescue but this results in him being put into a coma.
Distraught at his companion’s fate, Holmes nevertheless takes a steam train bound for Russia. He has deduced that the serial killer is from that land on account of the make of knife that he uses. Furthermore, the killer has been leaving taunting messages for Holmes written in blood on street walls.

New friends and enemies.
Holmes arrives in Saint Petersburg and takes up lodgings in Pekarskaya Street (this is a pun on Baker street – a pekarniya being a bakery in Russian). He mails missives back to London to update those at home and his letters are read out to the unconscious Watson as a kind of therapy (this narrative device is borrowed in part from The Hound of the Baskervilles).
His host consists of a hired medical assistant in the form of the hardboiled Doctor Kartsev (the 52 year old Muscovite Vladimir Mishukov) with whom he faces a rocky partnership.

The trope of Interference From Those in Authority is fulfilled by the Chief of Police Znamensky. This buffonish character regards Dostoevsky (who Holmes is well versed in) as over-rated and considers the work of the Ripper to be the handiwork of an ecaped gorilla. He regards the migrants deductive approach – presented here as a sort of savant’s mental tick over which Holmes has no control – as a lot of new fangled nonsense.
It is whilst on a fact-finding tour of the Saint Petersburg slums – bring a knife and a prayer Kartsev advises him -that he encounters the plot’s crucial love interest: Sophie, played by the inevitable Irina Starshenbaum.

Irina Starshenbaum provides the love interest [mirf.ru]

Russian self-reflection.

In a manner rare for a Russian product Sherlock in Russia does try to say something about Russian identity in relation to the rest of the world. It is the illiberal and very much autocratic Russia of Alexander the Third’s reign that Holmes steps into.( Some might draw paralells with today’s Russia).
As soon as Holmes emerges from the station at Saint Petersburg he treads on a cow pat. Later we learn that Kartsev harbours a particular suspicion of the British. His memory of his uncle being shot by by a British sniper in the Crimean war has seen to that.

Holmes, who has an improbable level of Russian fluency, has to learn some Russian idiomatic phrases. I'll smash myself into a pancake, for example is a promise to work very hard.
Znamensky, meanwhile does seem to embody a certain type of Russian provincial ignorance. He has to be told not to let his colleagues wash away the evidence from the scene of a crime, for example.

So…this Russia is a bit rustic, holds old grudges,is full of quaint phrases and inept in its handling of investigative policing. Later in the series Holmes will even utter the words: I don't understand Russia. It's terrible.

Holmes in love.
Matvyeev’s Holmes outstrips Downey Junior’s in being teary-eyed, soulful and in opening up to the ladies. This Holmes has a full on hetersosexual relationship, which may well be a first. He also suffers visionary flashbacks in the manner of the re-imagined Nikolai Gogol in the cinema-cum TV series Gogol, which may have been the model for this series.

That said, there is one traditional aspect of this drama and it is something which has lent a rare 18+ certificate and prevents it from going out on mainstream terrestrial Russian television. This is the dwelling on the gentleman sleuth’s addiction to cocaine. I doubt this fact will placate the international Sherlock Holmes community though.

Judging from the First Episode this series may be cheesy, but it is not bereft of intelligence. For me the most menmorable character was Doctor Kartsev. He was more Holmes than Holmes was in many ways.

The lead image: deneri.net.

SHERLOCK IN RUSSIA – First Episode with English subtitles:

THE ABRAMENKO EXPERIMENT: THE FILM `SPUTNIK`.

Egor Abramenko’s intense cosmic threat thriller SPUTNIK is so much more than a Russian Alien.

With mounting alarm the young psychologist observes the scene unfolding on the CCTV. The cosmonaut is thrown to the floor in a convulsive motion. From his mouth oozes a ridge of slime. Two spindly limbs emerge from this and the being begins to creep forward. The military man, also watching, has seen this all before….

Sputnik means satellite in Russian but also carries connotations of fellow traveller. The film with this title, a thriller with a science-fiction premise and scary movie trappings, is a rare beast in Russia. Such a mix of genres is matched only by The Fatal Eggs, an adaptation of the Bulgakov novel from 1995 and Diggers (2016) and Avanpost from last year.

Intended for release last April, the film ended up getting its premier on the net, owing to the pandemic. There it gathered over one million viewers in Russia alone. I, however, waited for the cinema doors to be flung open again, and my patience was rewarded. SPUTNIK is one picture that deserves to be experienced in a large and loud format.

Egor Abramenko, the man on the high stool, has been churning out commercials for years but his other brainchild was an eleven minute long short called Passenger released three years ago. This was to be the egg that was to hatch SPUTNIK.

Some bankable celebrities signed up for the project. That Golden Boy of the Russian media Fyodor Bondarchuk has come from behind the cameras to fill one of the main roles. So has the stately 33 year-old St Petersburgian Oksana Akinshina, who had a cameo role in Rassvet, this time being given prime space.

Interrupted mission.
Andropov is in the Kremlin – it is 1983 – and around the earth circle two cosmonauts on a routine orbital mission. They are about to re-enter the atmosphere when it happens. There is an unholy knock on the spacecraft’s hull….Only one of the crew members makes it back to terra firma alive – and he has black eyes….

Later a female psychologist – Tatyana Klimova – with a history of employing maverick methods, (Akinshina) is getting a dressing down at a tribunal in Moscow. As she leaves in disgrace she is approached by a military colonel called Semiparov (Fyodor Bondarchuk). He considers her to be of made of the right stuff for a position he has to offer her. This involves reaearch into a unique incident.

He chaperones her on a journey to the Caucuses. There, in a military installation, she learns that a cosmonuat who is supposed to have died on return is alive but infected with a parasite of unearthly origin, and no memory of how it got there. (Pyotr Fyodorov who also appeared in Avanpost).

Soon Tatyana begins to harbour qualms about the humanitarian implications of how this hero of the Soviet Union is being treated – as well as the uses to which the resulting knowledge will be put. Can she escape the compound and return to Moscow to expose the dark doings of this rogue operation?

Space age possession.
This 1 hour and 53 minute drama has a measured pace and highlights the human dilemmas that the situation throws up (challenging the view that science fiction and horror lacks human depth). There is even a sort of sub-plot concerning the neglected child of the cosmonaut, languishing away in a care home in Rostov-on-the-Don.

The two story writers Andrey Zolotarev and Oleg Malovichko had also both worked on Attraction (2017) and Invasion (2020) which were alien contact tales directed by Bondarchuk. Those blockbusters, however, were frothy fun-for-all-the-family affairs whereas SPTUTNIK contains more intelligence in its details.

With SPUTNIK being something of a star vehicle for her, Akinshina makes for a likeable lead. She is no Sigourney Weaver-like action hero but a woman constrained by her professional role while thrown into an extraordinary situation.

Bondarchuk, meanwhile, does what he does best: lend gravitas to the proceedings. He portrays a complex man with some paternal affection for Tatyana and a begrudging dependence on the creature who he wishes to isolate and exploit.

The assistant-to-the-heroine is a stiff white-coated drudge of a research scientist (played with conviction by Anton Vasilev) whose conscience is awakened by Tatyana. It is he who phones through to the Moscow authorities with some important information before being gunned down.

The creature itself is a fine piece of work, if not original.Stitched up by Main Road Post, its a puppet and CGI slimy quadruped with several eyes, insectoid limbs, buzz saw teeth and cute floppy ears. Living off the hormones produced by fear, it has a penchant for cracking open heads and slurping on the contents.

Last, but no means least is the score by Oleg Karpachev. With its bombastic drum-heavy sound, this really signs and seals the sense of a shadowy secret mission.

Well received.
The primary mood is one of mounting unease. It is refreshing to see that the director has not relied on sudden noises and appearances to stun us, but instead there are some drawn out nightmarish sequences, such as when the alien is being fed live prisoners. There is some gross out involved as well as some tomato ketchup flying about (both untypical for a Russian film) but this is restrained.

The 1983 period placement is a puzzle. Is a hidden event in history being shown to us – as in Apollo 18 ? Or is it a way round the problem of how to portray the military as fragmented and corrupted without incurring the wrath of the censors? Or is this just an exercise in nostalgia? (An iconic Russian toy does play a part in the proceedings).

Reaching America and the UK, SPUTNIK has set forth an excited rattle of keyboards and much of what is being said is positive. The default comparison most seem to be making is with the Alien franchise.

True SPUTNIK has a ballsy heroine, but this is less rare in Russian cinema, and otherwise it is earth bound, set in the past, and much less of a stalk-and-slash romp. A more telling comparison is with the British television series from 1953 – The Quatermass Experiment. The initial premise is almost identical except that SPUTNIK then takes off on a different tangent.

Russian language promo for the British series `The Quatermass Experment` Was this the real inspiration behind the film? [sweet.tv]

For me, the film leans too much on hackneyed tropes about a caring, maternal woman in opposition to a monomanic, ruthless male. Otherwise, the borrowing fom Nigel Kneale aside, it is quite fresh and there is something primal and archetypal in the idea of a man having a goblin in his stomach which comes out by night. As Tatiana asks: Parasite or symbiote?.

Many Russian horror movies seem targetted at a young South East Asian audience and tend to play down their national origins. Not so SPUTNIK, which -with its setting in the steppes, glimpse of Soviet times and concern with military machinations – is Russian through and through.

Lead image: in-rating.ru

The trailer (English subtitles):